One of the National Journal’s reasons for climate change going nowhere in Congress.
The issues of marriage, immigration, and gun control are rooted not in science, but culture. Climate change, and its connection to fossil fuels, is instead chiefly rooted in science. Almost all scientists around the world agree humans’ use of coal, oil, and natural gas is causing global warming, but the science is not yet quite as clear or settled when it comes to how global warming affects people on a more granular level by way of extreme weather such as droughts, more intense storms, and heat waves. As long as that scientific consensus is not strong, Washington will find it hard to gain momentum on big energy and climate legislation. People already find it hard to wrap their heads around how climate change affects them personally, and unsettled science doesn’t help make that clearer. Some experts say that by the time the scientific consensus about the connection between global warming and extreme weather is crystal-clear enough for political momentum, it will be too late to do anything about the most adverse effects of climate change. Some people think it’s already too late. [Emphasis added]
There is a place for consensus in science. We have a scientific consensus, backed by research and by results, that radiation can be therapeutic in treating cancer. We have a consensus that evolution has shaped life on Earth.
But consensus is not dispositive in science. We had a consensus about aether at one time and about phrenology. A med school professor of the 1950s is said to have told his students, “Half of what we’ll teach you will be shown to be wrong. And I don’t know which half.”
In any case, there’s no meaningful consensus about climate change — not its current status, not the sign for the next ten years, not the causes, not the effects. Trashing the economy and personal liberty on this basis is either foolish or statist, maybe both.